Golshifteh Farahani quotes:

If you want to do what you want to do, you cannot work. So art is going to be finished, and this is the will of the Islamic republic: to not have any artists or art and close the doors of all the cinemas and music and everything.

I don't believe I could live in Iran again. A tree, once uprooted from the earth, is very difficult to plant again.

I had to tell people I was not born with a scarf because I came out Iran. People think you came out of your mother with a scarf; they can't imagine that the scarf is not stuck to your head.

Iranian parents can't stop their children. They're just wild - they want to party, they want their rights, they want to paint, they want to dance. No one can stop these new generations coming. That's why Iran has to open up: it's like a pot full of hot water, vapour and steam.

There's an expression in Persian, 'to play with the lion's tail.' I wasn't what Iranian society wanted me to be - a good girl. I played with the lion's tail.

Paris is a city that liberates you as a woman from all your sins that you think you are guilty of; it washes away all of that, and you are free.

The subjects that I am working are movies that say something. They are shouting or criticising something. I would hate to play a princess waiting for the prince to come and give her a kiss.

In my life, my parents wanted me to be a musician, I was supposed to go to Vienna to study piano. But this train wanted to go in another direction.

I'm coming out of the belly of Iran. It was the only place I was free. It's funny - when I say that, everyone is like, 'What? Freedom?' But the freedom I felt in Iran I've never felt anywhere else. Freedom of mind, freedom of time, of spirit. But after a while, you're so wounded that if you continue thinking about Iran, it will kill you.

I think there is a problem in France that anyone who is not European, you want to know where they come from and why do they come from somewhere or why they speak English or why they are human. That's the big barrier for all of us that are coming from some far, far away countries. But at the end of the day, we are all artists.